Nobody is Coming to Save You!

Times are tough for many. Headlines are filled with negativity and foreboding. Things are changing at a pace never before seen in almost every industry and many are struggling to cope with that change. It doesn’t seem to matter if you’re in the tech industry, a middle manager for Netflix or Amazon, an appraiser, a lender, or real estate agent, the business world has changed, and some will never truly recover. 

Those are harsh words to start off a podcast, I know. But reality is rarely soft and comfortable, and the quicker one comes to this painful, yet I believe empowering, realization, that nobody is coming to save you, the quicker new paths and new views open up. It’s only when you are stuck in the false belief that there is some power, some force, some legislation, some politician, or some father or mother figure that is coming to your aid very soon that the suffering lingers and sets you up for even greater disappointment. 

Good morning my friends, my name is Blaine Feyen, founder of the coaching academy and your host for this, and every episode of the always sponsor free, Real Value Podcast.

In this episode, I’m not going to give you any step-by-step advice on what to do to increase your business. I’m not going to give you a top 5 or top 10 list of mindsets or things that the most successful businesses do to be successful. I’m not going to tell you what to do to 5X or 10X your business. You can go back and listen to any one of the 300+ episodes I’ve already done on those topics.

No, in this episode, we’re going to talk about the harsh reality that we all face in some way. The hope is that at least one thing we might talk about in this episode will resonate with you in a way that helps creates some movement, maybe some clarity, maybe some illumination on the path you want to take, and maybe more importantly, the path you should take, which, for some of you will be out of the business you’re in and on to new and better things.

I feel like I have at least one or two episodes every year where I’m telling some of the listeners to leave the business they’re in and go do something else and I guess this is that episode, although that’s not the main message I want to deliver in this episode. The message I want to deliver in this episode is a simple one, and it’s this: nobody is coming to save you.

I have conversations on an almost daily basis with coaching clients, my own employees, my adult sons, some private martial arts students, and even my partner, Jolene, where this topic comes up in one form or another. I was taught this by my father, had it reinforced by my martial arts mentor, Mr. Toyoda, and then by almost every life experience since I was 15 or 16. Nobody is coming to save you, so you’d better be prepared to fight to the death, or have a rock-solid plan to never get attacked, which, of course, is not up to us.

To be clear, I’m not actually talking about physical self-defense, although, if that’s interesting to you, take it to heart in your own training, nobody is coming to save you, so if part of your plan is to be able to defend yourself for a minute until someone steps up to help or the cops come and save you, you’re training wrong. The only correct mindset to have in self-defense and in business is that nobody is coming to save you, so you’d better be prepared to survive on your own with what you’ve got at your disposal.

There’s a harsh reality that we all live in and it’s that nobody cares. Of course, your family cares about you and you would hope that your close friends care about you. But even then, to what extent would some of your friends step up or step in, even if it meant a great cost to themselves. If you’ve lived on this planet for more than, say, 20 years, you’ve had an experience where you were faced with the sobering reality that what you thought were your people, your friends, your organization, your industry, or whatever relationship you thought existed to have your back, didn’t when it mattered most because the cost of doing so was too great to themselves in that moment. 

Friends, don’t be upset by this, this is simply human nature. The reality is that there is an extremely small number of people on this planet that will put themselves in harm’s way, even proverbially, for your benefit. Nobody is coming to save you, so it’s up to you to have a plan and figure shit out on your own. Don’t hope for a positive outcome, plan for one, and then have a secondary plan and a tertiary plan if the first don’t go as planned because nobody is coming to save you, you’re on your own.

There’s a quote from Hunter S. Thompson that says, "A man who procrastinates in his choosing will have his choice made for him by circumstance." This quote can be taken a few different ways. We can easily discern the message about not procrastinating. There’s something in the message pointing to the act of making a choice or a decision, which means to cut off all other options, and there’s also the part of the quote that speaks to circumstance. However you’re wired will determine what you take away from the quote.

The part that speaks to me the most, at least as it pertains to the potentially depressing topic of this episode, is the word circumstance, which entails the sum of all the factors that have some bearing on potential outcomes beyond our control. "A man who procrastinates in his choosing will have his choice made for him by circumstance." What Hunter S. Thompson is saying, essentially, is that nobody is coming to save you so, stop procrastinating on your plans, your decisions, your vision, and on taking action that probably should’ve been taken yesterday, but wasn’t.

Appraisers, nobody is coming to save you. The Fed is not coming to aid you by lowering interest rates so that you can finally get an order. Potential home sellers are not magically going to come off the sidelines and put their house on the market so you can finally get an order. AMCs are not going to magically close up shop, nor are they going to start paying you more out of the goodness of their hearts, nobody cares about you. Realtors, you’re learning that NAR doesn’t care about you and I beyond the fees they collect from all of us each year. Don’t get upset by that, be comforted in the process of giving up false hope that there is somebody out there who will swoop in and save you, because they won’t. Almost every person, every company, every industry, every organization will save itself first, even if that means leaving some of its constituents, its members, its friends, and its neighbors high and dry in the process.

I know that sounds harsh, but I hope you’re hearing it in the way that’s meant to sound. It’s meant to come across as a wakeup call, not a statement of apathy about the inherent trait in all of us to act in our own self-interest first in most situations. I get it, you and I both would sacrifice ourselves for our own children, maybe even a stranger’s child. We’d sacrifice ourselves for our parents, our loved ones, maybe even our neighbors if we have to. That’s not what is meant by the statement, ‘nobody cares’ and ‘nobody is coming to save you’.

Those two statements are statements of fact that, when it comes to your income, your health, your business, your job, your personal growth, your savings and investments, your net worth, the house and neighborhood you live in, your relationships, and almost anything else you want to toss in there, nobody cares about that stuff like you do, so it’s up to you create your own circumstances to the degree you are able. Nobody cares and nobody is coming to save you.

As we’ve talked on this show many times, there is an in-built response mechanism in almost all of us that leans toward comfort or discomfort, toward less movement instead of more movement, toward maintaining the status quo instead of disruption, and more energy spent on fighting to keep things as they are instead of relaxing into the very natural evolutionary process of change.

There are people in every industry fighting for things to go back to the way they were because it was better yesterday than it is today. There are people spending inordinate amounts of current and future energy stores fighting the powers that be in an attempt to force some kind of change back to the past, instead of reading the writing on the walls of progress and making the necessary changes within themselves and their businesses to weather the changes. Nobody cares and nobody is coming to save you.

You only have so much energy and attention available to you each day, spend it and invest it in the things that will make your future much greater than your past. Nobody cares about you and your life and business like you do and nobody is coming to save you. It something is going to happen for you, it’s completely up to you and it’s imperative that you give up the false hope that something is going to happen externally that will turn everything around for you. If that does happen, it will be a complete coincidence and unduplicatable.

One of the big problems for appraiser mindsets, and this goes for agents and lenders as well, is that the last 10 or 12 years of record low interest rates and market conditions were external circumstances created beyond any of our own doing and control, which has led almost every one of you to believe any success you were having was because of your superior business acumen and keen insight. In most cases, it wasn’t. It was because of the market, and the probability of those conditions existing in that way again is almost zero in our lifetimes. It’s time to snap out of the hypnosis you’ve lured yourself into believing that somehow you were in the driver’s seat.

If you want to be in the real driver’s seat, you have to jettison hope as a strategy and adopt the attitude of ‘nobody cares’ and ‘nobody is coming to save you’, so get to work on you, on your business, on moving beyond comfort, and do the hard shit that life and business requires in order to be truly successful. It’s time to either get creative and find a real need in the market, or move along and go find something else to do.

I’ll end this episode with this: don’t be depressed or upset by things being hard or things changing, get excited. When things change, they often become difficult again, like they are at the beginning of something new. When things get difficult, most people won’t be willing to do what it takes to move through the challenge. Tough times separate the warriors from the weak and you get to decide which you’ll end up being when you make a decision to either adapt or not adapt. When you find something that is difficult, change the voice in your head from, ‘oh shit, this is really tough and I don’t like it’, to ‘oh yeah, this is going to suck for anyone who wants to try to compete!’

If something seems at hard at first, remember the law of inertia and the law of momentum, both of which essentially say that objects at rest tend to stay at rest, and objects in motion tend to stay in motion, unless or until acted upon by an outside or unbalanced force. The great lessons in those two principles is that the beginning of anything is always the most difficult and the rewards are the smallest. Once you create some movement and get started, the law of momentum kicks in and objects in motion tend to stay in motion. A moving car is easier to turn than a stationery one.

Once you get past inertia and momentum takes over, things get easier and the rewards come faster. Be happy that things aren’t easy because when everything is easy, the competition is fierce, and the prices are low. When and where things are difficult, the competition thins out drastically and you essentially become your only real competition. Most people succumb to the law of inertia in that they are unwilling to move past the ‘object’s at rest’ phase.

Difficulty is a blessing because it forces us to be better and it also weeds out the competition. The fewer the competitors, at least in business, the more you control the inputs and the profits.

Friends, nobody cares that you got into a business when times were plenty, and you didn’t build a solid foundation. Nobody cares that you don’t have any work now because you didn’t build solid relationships, didn’t network properly or at all, and didn’t develop even a one-page strategic plan that would help you differentiate yourself from everyone else. Nobody cares that you’re upset because you can’t pay your bills and will have to get a part-time job. Nobody cares if you don’t renew your license and decide to leave the business. Nobody cares and nobody is coming to save you. It’s tough to hear, I know. It was one of the toughest things I ever heard from my mentor, but it almost immediately snapped me out of my own delusion that somebody was coming to make things all better for me.

Once you realize that, ultimately, you’re alone in all this, you either curl up in a ball and quit, or you stand up, dust off, look out at the horizon and decide what you’re going to go conquer next. Nobody is coming to save you.